DEAD LIKE ME Creator Bryan Fuller Developing Hannibal Lecter TV Series

I kinda miss Hannibal Lecter. No, seriously, I do. I miss the scary version of Hannibal. The guy who made your skin crawl with a few simple words, a slurping sound and a lack of blinking. I miss the guy that taunted Will Graham (William Petersen in what was basically the prototype for his work on CSI) in MANHUNTER, who nibbled on Ray Liotta’s brain matter in HANNIBAL and scared the living daylights out of the entire world in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Is it bad that I miss the monster who crucified a guard and cut some poor schmuck’s face off just so he could escape and live the good life down in Bimini? That guy scared me.

Then came RED DRAGON. Yeah, yeah, yeah, one can argue that it was truer to Thomas Harris’s novel than MANHUNTER. That doesn’t change the fact that Hannibal wasn’t scary anymore. Anthony Hopkins wasn’t scary. He was scary in SILENCE. Hell, he was downright f**king frightening in that flick.

And he was pretty damn messed-up in HANNIBAL. Maybe not scary, but definitely demented. Once DRAGON rolled around, however, the teeth were gone. The shark was no longer dangerous. Hannibal had become a punchline, a joke, a non-threat. Not sure if it was Ted Tally’s script, Brett Ratner’s direction or the fact that Ralph Fiennes was a beast (far scarier than Hannibal), but MANHUNTER ended up being the better adaptation despite the fact that it changed a good deal of the details.

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